Blood and Water
by Miss-Smilla
Summary: PG15. Maybe revenge is the tie that binds us.
1. I am your opus

**Disclaimer:** Fox logos, the LXG trademarks and characters do not belong to me. I make no profit from this venture.  
**Author's Notes:** If anyone notices technological discrepancies in this, it is because I've set this firmly in the steam punk genre.  
This follows on from Shards, so some references may not make much sense to brand new readers, but this is supposed to be accessible to all.

It's been a while. A long while. Let's fix that – I hate leaving things unfinished.

* * *

**Blood and Water**

* * *

**Chapter One: I am your opus**

* * *

It begins with a death.

Not the hack of the knife across the throat; metal itching across bone; slipping as the blood bubbles; rutting on the raw edges of the meat; the cartilage crunching and splintering with a wet suck.

Not the blister of the flame; the scorch of the skin; the tightness of the flesh crisping, peeling, falling away; the lungs flaming, boiling with each breath; eyes crying hot blood, as the veins shrivel tightly around the muscle.

Instead, the inhalation of liquid; foamy as the surf, the teeth biting against this invasion with the skull's grin; chomping in the mouth, the water seeping, slipping into the throat with the forceful murky breath of liquid, burning as it slides hotly across the trachea, churning in the lungs with the futile boil of the last breath.

The struggle, the immersed victory of that black water; all serving as a prelude to the damp, rich soil beneath his feet.

The edges crumbling on themselves, scattering to cover the coffin; a rain of soil that forms an eiderdown to smother the coffin: small, pale wood, so small it is almost a perfect hexagon.

And the salt sweetness of the air; damp, and cloying, mixed with the screams of the gulls swimming overhead and the humidity of fish and vinegar in the mouth, all this wheeling in the fog around him as the priest takes his point of departure from St Paul and the passage on redemption through the blood.

And floating there, opposite him, white burning through the December darkness crawling up from the grave, is Skinner's face; closed in the half-light.

Sawyer has no words that will make this right, nothing that will expel the water from lungs and heat the blood. No holy grail to pour into small lips, blue from the cold. And like the others the fierce spite of weakness bites him in the cold morning air.

And Skinner; supported by the salt-water ties of the League who stand around him as blurs of empathy, swirls coldly in the stilled heartbeat of this: his home. The remote island of Faihal where the only thing Sawyer hears breathing is the sea.

And the only thing open is the grave.

In the clearing the water moves quickly, falling with the sharp shatter. In the air above him, moving with the sweet-sap smell crawling in his nose, the leaves breathe, in and out, in and out.

And behind all of this, the cold, fresh smell, salting his throat, his eyes; ice stretches across the wind, moving from the bay in dead, drifting circles of bone-bleached flakes, dry as the sea.

* * *

"It must hurt."

Nemo's voice from behind; deep and resonant in the hush of the breathing clearing.

Skinner has no choice but to hear him. It is too silent not to.

"What must hurt?"

He avoids eye contact, even though Nemo—creator of evasion and ambiguities—seeks it. To look into those eyes would be to admit it—that; yes, it hurts; it hurts more than I think you could imagine. Perhaps only Alan would understand this hollow feeling—this hole, an abomination of blackness that opens up when a child dies.

He doesn't say this—his voice has stopped, bruised from the effort of those three words, and yet Nemo pulls no punches.

"Death, especially when it comes so early, so unexpectedly seems unfathomable. You've lost the piece of immortality that your nephew embodied. When he died, part of you died with him. The death of any child hurts more than words can express."

And it does; with the throb of a raw wound. Something indefinable has been cut out of him. He feels the pain in his throat; the clawing of salty tears, the clout of a scream beating silently to the fist of his heart.

"This will not help." Nemo states, those eyes blazing across the paint on Skinner's face. "To come here; to wallow in this—this is not the way to recovery."

Skinner turns to him. He doesn't know what's on his face, but whatever Nemo sees there is enough to create a change; a click of understanding.

"They say he died here y'know."

The words are out before he has given them permission, loud and with a deep anger behind them, and if he thinks anything it is: no—stopstop.

Nemo continues watching, impassively, and it is this, more than anything that lets Skinner continue, rage, perhaps, if not disappearing then at least subsiding.

"I'm looking with the wrong eyes for this job—but—" A gesture towards the weir.

Nemo's eyes follow his hand out to the moving water and for a while they continue moving, skimming along the water. Then he moves out, following the stream, his hands in the water.

"What do you see here?" he asks Skinner.

"It's-wrong," he replies, hoping that—

"Perhaps: there are no stones, no currents; nothing to explain the fall fully."

"And no footprints—no tracks. Where is the evidence?"

Skinner looks at him and strains to see the same deep trickle of suspicion behind Nemo's eyes —darker than the water in the weir and just as murky. He can almost hear it in his voice when he asks:

"This is why you came back; because something is wrong here?"

* * *

"He was a careful child!"

The same bitter anger is back. Nemo can see it in the twist in Skinner's frame, in the hands that seem to want to clench, not around the back of the chair, but instead around Jekyll's throat.

"I'm not suggesting he wasn't, Skinner, but a child can slip and drown in an inch of water if they land properly!"

Nemo watches Skinner jerk violently as if the words are made flesh—the pain physiological.

"There are no tracks! There are no stones!" Skinner's mouth is barely breathing around the words, "You can ask Nemo—he didn't drown—he was murdered!"

There is a stillness in the room as if the breath has been lost completely; a vacuum of sound.

Nemo speaks, perhaps without knowing what he is saying.

"There was definitely more than we could see there—but murder, Skinner?" He sees Skinner's eyes, full of suspicion and hurt flick between him and Jekyll, the hands tighten on the back of the chair.

He is reminded of a joke shared once, Skinner teasing with the simple line: "You won't see me coming, you know." Perhaps, Nemo thinks, there is more in that statement than humour.

When he begins to speak again there is a controlled element to his voice; the hint of something suppressed.

"Every month my sister was paid a total of fifty pounds—a widow's pension. Her husband was killed a mining accident. The payment of the pension only happened if the child was still living with her." The voice rises slightly, the thing beneath the current stirs. "Doesn't that seem just the slightest bit odd to you?"

Jekyll tilts his head slightly and Nemo can hear the sigh in the words even before they are spoken.

"Generous, Skinner, not suspicious. But seeing as you're so insistent I'll agree to this—we'll look at it, if only to assure you that there was no murder here."

"Don't you pull that patronising shit with me Jekyll!"

"Goddammit Skinner—!"

The voices are louder, boiling over each other, and in them Nemo can hear the real threat of violence below the surface.

"_YOU WILL BE SILENT!_"

His ship, his crew will not be pulled apart again, and it is this though more than anything that is made clear when he speaks with the voice of a Dybbuk—that thing outside of himself that terrifies even these two into the uneasy silence of the room.

The words have stopped them, and Nemo knows he must fill the air with something more constructive.

"We will look into this—not to reassure ourselves, not to prove ourselves—but because this needs to be done." He states.

They are looking at him now with the intent not to look at each other, and if anything, this focussed attention makes him feel less solid, makes the intent he is holding feel like liquid. When he speaks once again, he feels something other than himself forming the words.

"We will do this properly gentlemen, we will do this well."

A pause.

"Now; where do we then begin?"

* * *

The room glistens with the smell of antiseptic.

Jekyll knows from the way the doors swing shut that they are oiled; from the way that the desk shines that it is oiled.

Everything is polite, professional and efficient; smooth and calm.

His hand is cold when he places it in Jekyll's.

"Doctor Marber," he introduces himself, and Jekyll has to concentrate hard, the individuality of the man is falling away like so much water. "Were you a relative?"

Consistently making eye contact is hard enough; Jekyll has seen this gaze many times; he saw it in Medical Lectures where the surgeon made the first cut into the flesh—the look that speaks of nothing but a disjointed nature from the act the hands are doing and the way the brain is feeling.

He feels like laughing, with something sick inside him; some black bit of humour looking at the man across from him, and he has to clamp down hard.

"A friend of the family." Is the safest response, and his mouth twitches just sounding it.

"I'm sorry for your loss." Marber's mouth forms the words but Jekyll knows that he's a million miles from here, that he's said these exact words before, and for him, now, they have no meaning from re-use. "Obviously, I'll do whatever I can to help you today." He finishes.

He feels the sudden urge to dislocate Marber's shoulder.

"Perhaps you can," Jekyll begins, matching voice to voice, gesture to gesture, subtle pantomime. He finds it gives a certain needling-satisfaction that dislocated joints lack. "You were the one whom examined William?"

The doctor acknowledges this with a nod, brief, abrupt. Perhaps the needling is too severe.

Beginning again, with a practised smoothness developed in the viewing rooms of his own mortuary training: "What did he die of?"

He notices how the eyes flick into sudden awareness, a brief disjoint from the earlier professional discourtesy.

"He drowned." The voice replies, measured, careful. "When he fell, he must have knocked himself unconscious, the body's natural reaction is to keep breathing, and so he simply—" The voice pauses."—drowned."

"Physiologically," Jekyll asks, "what does that mean?"

Jekyll watches as Marber relaxes. Before him is no longer a man who is mocking, defensive, but a grieving, uncertain specimen. "Physiologically, in fresh water drownings inhaled water is immediately absorbed into the blood causing hemodilution—" he pauses, to check how Jekyll is holding-up under the introduction of medical terminology. "Please stop me if I'm going too fast for you." Marber states and smiles; he continues, "The diluted blood quickly leads to heart failure due to ventricular fibrillation, a condition simply described as shivering of the heart, or anoxia, which, for the layperson is oxygen starvation."

"So," Jekyll begins, "William drowned in freshwater, which cased dilution of the blood and resulting ventricular—sorry," he pauses, trips over his own words, deliberately, "what was that again? Fibrillation?"

"Yes," Marber answers, nodding slowly and deliberately, "a tragic accident."

Jekyll meets his eyes, and holds his gaze. Marber is waiting for him to leave, to accept the reasonable explanation on offer.

Jekyll leaves him stewing in his own juices for a while. He watches as Marber's eyelids blink swiftly, once, twice, thrice.

"Was there are evidence of physical violence?"

Marber shifts in his seat as the question expands to fill the room. It's not an uncomfortable movement. It's the movement of a man who knows the game and is approaching the set and match.

It infuriates Jekyll.

"None whatsoever, sir." Marber's reassuring smile creeps across his skin. "We check very carefully in these cases; there was no bruising, no sign that anything untoward happened, it is a tragic accident, but one that occurs most frequently on this island when children have been left unsupervised."

He feels now that Skinner was right; something is wrong here, something is hidden behind the professional courtesy.

"May I see the medical report?"

The smile never wavers. "I'm afraid not sir. Pathologists reports are available to the police and direct family members only."

He feels his skin prickling in anger. This conversation is drawing to a close for Marber before it has even started, like so many before.

"Is that all I can do for you, sir?"

When he speaks he can hear the anger in his voice.

"You have very advanced technology at your disposal here Doctor Marber, correct?" He is rewarded with a smile and a nod of the head, smooth, relaxed. "Why then was it that a boy with no monetary backing, no inheritance or rich family could be autopsied here? Where was his payment coming from?"

Marber manages to look truly sympathetic for a brief moment, but when he speaks Jekyll is very aware that an act is being performed for his benefit. "William's mother, Mrs Chrishaaven, was awarded a widows pension after the very tragic death of her husband," Marber explains and shakes his head, slowly, softly and very carefully. "Such a tragic lady," he sighs, "I believe there was enough money from that to pay for the doctor's attention."

He stands carefully, the smile, once again, in place.

"I am sorry to have to leave you, but if that is all Mr. Jekyll, then I'm afraid I have patients to see and reports to complete. My secretary will be through to show you out, good day to you."

He shakes Jekyll's hand, walks to the back of the room and walks through a frosted-glass door into the laboratories beyond. He leaves the professional office and leaves Jekyll alone.

To his left there are three filing cabinets, locked, he is sure but in his hand is the lock-pick Skinner has lent him. He feels a strange sense of satisfaction.

He starts at the drawer labelled C-Ci. The pick crunches with a hollow reverberation as it enters the lock, and clicks as it turns through the combinations. A hollow clang and the drawer opens.

He begins flicking through the files. Carver, Cerran, Chris and there, amongst the C's: Chrishaaven; A blue envelope containing a sheaf of papers that he pockets.

* * *

"I heard."

She's trying to be as quick to the point as she can be. It's difficult when she has to talk to him. Something in her heart pulls tight. She remembers him, flayed, carrying her through the cold night air.

Jekyll sits, back to the door, sleeves rolled up just the smallest bit, collar loose. When he turns there's a light in his eyes.

"Who did you hear from?" he asks, and the warmest gesture for Mina to come into the room is in his hands.

She smiles, sits on the small chair next to the bed. "Skinner," she watches the discomfort flit across his face, and her smile grows broader. "He's grateful, not angry."

He turns back to the papers on the desk in front of him and she can see the back of his neck, bare just above the collar of his shirt.

"He was right." Jekyll shakes his head slowly.

She pauses, lets the admission breathe for a few second. "Was he? Murder is a huge leap of logic. What would anyone have to gain by the death of a small child?" she finally asks.

She feels a deep quiet within her. She knows where Skinner is now, knows what his grief feels like.

Jekyll turns to her, thoughtful and quiet in the lamplight. He beckons her over to join him.

"Here and here," he points to little entries on the patient's record. Standing above him she can smell the heat of his blood in the warmth, coppery, rich as new pennies. "And again: here and here and here."

She looks at the entries.

"Full physical examinations." She summarises.

He turns to look at her, his eyes liquid in the reflection of the lamplight. His breath brushes against hers.

She moves away.

"Why would a leading pathology and medical laboratory perform monthly examinations on a boy with no connections of any importance to the institute?"

* * *

At first Sawyer thinks he's back underwater where the Nautilus burns above him and the firth is ice cold, churning and bloody.

But the water around him is salty, black, still.

So salty he feels himself floating to the surface naturally. Soft debris keep brushing against his skin, soft as flesh, cold as seaweed.

Something tangles around his ankle. He pushes out against it, but it tightens.

If anything, the more he struggles the more it tightens.

Above him he can see light; white as day, cool as ice, he feels the water pressing on him, holding him.

His lungs grow tighter, the water grows heavier.

He kicks out now, stronger. He starts moving his arms actively reaching for the surface.

Whatever it is it holds on.

The water is so heavy, the pressure is so cold. The ice is seeping into his mouth; water between the skull's grip of his teeth.

He's frantic, fear pulsing through him in waves, and the more he kicks the more he seems to sink back down.

He stops looking ahead to that whiteness, and looks back to see what's holding him.

And beneath him—

* * *

_TBC_


	2. I am your valuable

**Disclaimer:** Fox logos, the LXG trademarks and characters do not belong to me. I make no profit from this venture.  
**Author's Notes:** The poem quoted is Elizabeth Barret Browning's _Aurora Leigh_.

* * *

**Blood and Water**

* * *

**Chapter Two: I am your valuable**

* * *

—It's always her.

_A still Medusa with mild milky brows,  
All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes…_

It's always the same snatch of poetry that sings through him as he lets the last breath out.

He always drowns with her beside him.

* * *

"Bad dreams?"

Sawyer feels like biting Skinner. He feels as if he should tear into the concern and the regret implicit in that statement. The need to reject the patronising and sympathising, because no matter how many Freudian interpretations you want to extract from his nightmares he's grown, he's changed, he doesn't need to go back to the womb. The hunger now is to bite back. And he does.

"Dreams that were just bad would be a relief."

He watches with some satisfaction as Skinner's face shuts in upon itself, and then the pang of regret as he remembers why the lines have become so deep, so tunnel-like. At the end of these tunnels he can almost see William: the body washed and still and forever the image that Skinner will see; not playing, not growing, but still with a completeness that is too peaceful, and perhaps too restless.

An apology is too little, too late. And he doesn't quite know what he'd say if he could find the words.

"Where today?" Is the most he can offer.

"To the corporation." Is all Skinner can offer in return.

* * *

Perhaps it's good that they don't talk; perhaps it's a wise thing that the air has so much frost in it that to remove your mouth from behind its collar means to shear your lungs. Or at least this is what Sawyer reassures himself with in the climb, the soil crisp beneath his boots. The flakes are beginning to fall now, bringing with them the smell of the north—of Maryland and Washington and the cold snow of New York.

Strange to think that Skinner, carrying London in every turn of phrase, should come from here; closer to Iceland than to Paris, an island so northern that the light was almost completely gone during winter, leaving them with the streak of the northern lights, crimson splashes amongst the green and blue, the stars that stretched in the brightest, whitest smiles like children's grins.

The smoke and steam on the horizon, the quiet churning of the processing plant chewing over the few scraps thrown to it. Ahead of them Sawyer can make out the bright gleam of spades, shovels, coffee mugs; the gleam of workmen at rest.

"Afternoon." Greets Skinner, his cockney disappearing in a twist of the local accent, there's a picture in that voice; the visible Skinner, tilling the earth, wrapped against the cold, it scares Sawyer to see something so intimate so suddenly.

"Afternoon," They smile, all coffee-bean warmth and rather more than curiosity for Skinner and his white greasepaint.

After the offers of a few drinks in the public house later tonight, it turns out they're all very warm gentlemen who've worked as miners for the company for thirty years and now have the rather cold task of readying the land for resale. They happen to know that the chief accountant—that's the one who deals with that money, y'know, pensions and bonds and contracts—Mr. Christie retired 3 years ago, lives on fàrdach street and how come we'd like to know?

Feeling conspicuous, the American accent thick in his mouth, Sawyer replies that it's just a few enquiries as to what's happening to the pensions now that the company's closing.

They give him nods, deep understanding sketched rather superficially on their eyes.

* * *

"The parable of the talents is all about loyalty."

Dignified as any official of the company, Skinner sees in Christie the straight-backed corporation he grew up with. The soot of the workers who crawled from under the hills lies in the blackness of his suit; the brightness of the pennies passed from the officials to the men is in his hair. Behind his grey eyes is a church-fed brightness.  
Although, it could just be a reflection from the fire.

"There is much more than simple loyalty to God, there is a complex worldly loyalty that we must all deal with. Jephthath may have killed his daughter in promise to the Lord, but I doubt either of you gentlemen would kill your own son."

The voice is a corduroy scratch against his skin. Skinner is too numb for the words to have any affect; they fall like so much snow. To his left Sawyer flinches in his place, and the teacup rattles in the saucer he is holding.

It has been a long time since Skinner talked to anyone from the corporation, and he had forgotten the fearsome scriptural knowledge they bring to the elevenses.

"I was accountant for the Corporation for forty-five years. Do you understand?"

"Are you saying you won't help us?" Comes Sawyer's voice; filling the quiet, patterned space with the warmest threat.

In the quietness Christie takes time to stoke the fire, the glow flaring and receding, flaring and sparking and dying down again.

"You want to know about the pension?" He asks, flaring eyes looking at Skinner with the indistinguishable expression of the company. "A widow's pension, fifty pounds per month, awarded to Mrs Sarah Chrishaaven."

He walks to the silver tea tray, refills his cup, all with the measured stride of one in control, in perfect understanding of what is set out before him—how to work around the logic of the problem. Skinner stays perfectly still.

"Your brother-in-law Mr. Skinner was killed in an expedition to the islands in the Davis Strait, west of Greenland. The 1893 expedition, in which the accident took place, was to the island of Ablach."

Sawyer continues to stand behind his chair, a nervous energy striking through his skin that Rodney can see in the flickering light of the fire, and he prays it won't boil over in the silence. The pauses, where Christie is not speaking, the times when he holds his rough voice are as thin as ice, and just as brittle.

Sawyer holds his patience. Thank God.

"In organising funding, equipment and manpower for these expeditions, there are many companies involved—those who deal with drilling, with diamonds with minerals, the scientists. Within each of these structures there is a hierarchy. There were parts of the accounts that even I did not have access to."

"So, you're telling us that you know nothing." Sawyer spits into the flow.

Skinner could quite happily strangle him.

Christie on the other hand looks completely unperturbed. He drinks from his tea, eyes focussed on some invisible distance. All Skinner can hope for is that this distance is filled with some knowledge that will help.

"In any company like ours there will be investors, partners; men who spend their money on extravagance and can retire still fat and happy. There was a lot of excess from the investors in our company." His eyes spark, and Skinner wonders if he is amused or irritated. "Mr Guildhall, one of the main investors, demanded at his funeral that he be sunk in a lead-lined coffin into the North Atlantic while the soprano, Daae, sang Ponchielli on deck."

Sawyer looks like he wants to intervene, to interrogate, and all Skinner can do is fix him with a stare. All he can hope for is that his invisible eyes will be able to tell Sawyer to shut up. That you are not helping, not in the least bit intimidating—

"It was safe to assume that with all this extravagance the investors, the partners, were paying very little attention to the shop-floor running of the corporation. At the end of the day all important decisions were left in the hands of the finance director Mr. Lukas. Obviously this man had a great deal of responsibility. Not once did he prove himself unable to bring to his role the required amount of trustworthiness and loyalty."

—And I need you to just. Hold. Your. Goddamn. Heels.

"The day I retired we balanced the books for the semi-audit. I reached the file for the 1893 expedition and there was an unexplained amount of money—a rather large amount—unitemised. Completely unacceptable. So I go to look for the file card on which it should be registered. Missing." For the first time since he has begun talking he looks fully into Skinner's glasses, eyes pin-wheeling with red from the fire. "I went to Mr. Lukas. His answer was to assure me that he authorised that entry personally, that there was no need to worry."

"So," Sawyer breaks, "What did you do?"

"I went back and I entered the numbers, and in doing so I made myself an accomplice.  
Do as you will do. I have acknowledged my debt to God. It is to the amount of six hundred pounds."

* * *

It is a very wet evening. The snowflakes alight on her arms, her wings, white fluttering briefly before melting away—transient individuality, beautiful in their mathematical precision. She always admired snowflakes for the way they could hold together.

Below her is Skinner, a faint ripple in the snow, glowing molten with the thrum of blood in his veins. Ahead is the corporation; still humming with sleeping industry, hulking in the dark.

The weaving light that is Skinner is slowing, stopping; she touches down beside him melting into herself so that the wet slap of the wind hits her flesh, curls around her. Her eyes burn red at the discomfort.

"How are you holding up?" She asks, noticing the way he shivers in the night air—skin exposed for the sake of invisibility.

"Fine." But of course, always the answer she remembers giving, even at the funeral. To hear every bereaved parent's words coming from his mouth—clenched around the snow and the wind—it's disquieting.

"Time to fly?" She asks, impassive, showing enough dissociation from him to please.

"Only if you promise not to drop me."

They touch on the roof, wet flesh shivering beneath her hands. He moves towards the door almost immediately, Mina's penknife in his hand. She smiles, bitter.

Fingersmith.

"Shall I wait here until needed?" She asks, "You are, after all, least likely to be seen."

The twist of the knife in the lock and the door pops open, soft as the clouds streaming above.

"You can disperse if you need to." He states, gesturing for her to walk on in, little rivers of lava in his fingers barely cracks of light, he is so contracted with cold.

It is dark and warm inside, with the wet smell of snow and paper, the belly of the beast. He leaves streaks of water behind him.

"Records?"

He shrugs, frowning, moving ahead till he's almost swallowed up in the dark.

Flights of stairs; wrought iron twisting in ornate bars, like cages, stretch down from the balcony she stands on. Skinner steaks down one to her left. She diffuses into the air, caught in the darkness, wheeling down, breathing softly.

Appearing at his side, very quietly, very still, just a hand, a face in the dark.

"Right, left or straight ahead?" He asks.

"Ever read the inferno?" she replies. He looks at her, blood glowing like the darkest nemesis. Very still—not amused. "Seeing as we are here, it's got to be left."

A long corridor, black doors set deep into the walls. Three doors to the right, two to the left. She pushes against the first; it seems to solidify against her.

"Can you pick this lock?"

He crouches to twist the penknife in. Underneath the whisper of grinding comes the slow hiss of heat.

When he pulls out the knife it has melted.

"We're leaving that room then."

She has already moved to the next door. It opens to her touch, something like water brushing against her fingers from the solidity of the door. The light moving on the walls and the murk of the dark makes her feel as if she is underwater. The pools, hacked crudely into the floor below her feet are empty.

Skinner follows behind her, glancing down, the water's reflection passing straight through him. He glances to her briefly.

"Door ahead?" He asks. "I doubt we can get any record from whatever the hell this is."

She strides ahead pushing lightly against the blackness, the door swinging open lightly to let out a puff of stale air.

"Records." She answers.

* * *

"There was an earlier expedition." Nemo states.

Sawyer watches his fingers trace the handwritten figures, inks fading to little sunspots on the page.

"1868, subsidised by The Carter Diamond Company. There's a reference to another accident—more fatalities." His eyes shoot to Skinner, wrapped in a dressing gown in front of the fire, his painted face watching Nemo and Jekyll with very controlled, still movements.

"Ablach seems to be a very unhealthy place to visit." He states, deadpan in the silence.

Sawyer feels his skin itching uncomfortably.

The rustle of film from Jekyll as he lights the box, clipping the film into the edges; Ghostly bones lit from behind. His voice is almost subdued, but with something almost remorseless hidden in it.

"Medical records for the three casualties on the 1893 expedition. It looks like a simple mining accident. The charge exploded before they could move away."

Skinner's jaw tightens visibly, Sawyer begins to brace himself, and he's sure he sees Mina and Nemo exchange worried glances.

"It could be explained away, If it wasn't for the fact that they look as if they were sitting on top of the charge. Directly on top—no more than a metre away."

The tension changes its tone. Becomes something almost insubstantial. Sawyer feels the itching grow, holding his legs. The light from the box playing on Jekyll's face gives a desperate reality to the scene.

Mina walks to stand beside Jekyll, begins leaning into the film.

"Something else too," Jekyll continues, opening a blue envelope, "William's autopsy: Water was drawn from the blood into the lungs, causing the blood to become more concentrated, leading to an increased load on the heart and heart failure. He drowned in sea or salt water."

Jekyll looks directly at Skinner.

"Doctor Marber told me William drowned in freshwater, which has the opposite affect physiologically-speaking: diluted blood and Ventricular Fibrillation."

"What does that mean?" Skinner asks, abrupt and almost frantic in the firelight.

"That something is very wrong," Jekyll answers, "Very wrong indeed."

_TBC_


End file.
